Lost Links
by theGWENismightierthantheSWORD
Summary: (Post-Breakout Kings.) A very sinister Fox River inmate begins to appear in college graduate Gwen Wilson's apartment every night in the days between Christmas and New Year's. How is Theodore Bagwell materializing without leaving the prison walls? How does he return to Fox River each morning? What mysterious power links them together? M for language and sexual suggestion.
1. Chapter 1

The Day after Christmas was fun, I guess. In the morning I talked to my dad on the phone. He said that after shopping and lunch with Shawna and all that sh*t, he was going to take poinsettias to Mom's grave.

"Okay, Dad. You do that," was all I said. After all, he says that ever year, but I don't think he's actually visited the cemetery once since he married Shawna.

After that bit of holiday joy was over, I did a little shopping for myself. My aunt had said she was sending me a Christmas present when I talked to her the weekend before, but nothing had come in the mail, and she's pretty forgetful, so I wasn't too surprised that nothing had shown up in my mailbox by Christmas Eve. I live in Nashville, so I went down to Green Hills Mall, which is where the rich people hang out. Most of the stores were out of my price range, but I window-shopped like the rich b*tch I totally wasn't. In the end I did find one shop with a reasonable sale and I bought myself a pair of shoes. High living right there.

It was about 4:00 p.m. by the time I was done in the Green Hills district, so I figured it was time to hit the bars. After all, the way I see it, Christmastime is one of the most legitimate excuses ever made for singles to get plastered. They drink wine at mass, too, don't they? (At least Catholics do.) It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I went downtown and started drinking. I'm not a hard drinker, so I took it slow, one shot at a time. No way in hell I was getting tipsy and calling a coworker for a ride on the f*cking Day after Christmas.

So why wasn't I spending the Day after Christmas with family or friends or my coworkers? So, hanging out with Dad and Shawna? …That's a no. Shawna's and my relationship had always been strained at best, but since I left home it had gone from bad to worse. I stopped going home for holidays when I starting going for my master's and finally got an apartment. I don't think either of them missed me too much. My aunts and uncles? The only one I'm really close to is Aunt Jeanne, but she's down in Alabama like Dad and Shawna, and it's a bit of a drive. Besides, she's always got her hands full with Katelyn, and I felt guilty bothering her now that Katelyn's dealing with all that teen drama sh*t not to mention everything else.

So what about friends, and coworkers? Well, I had just graduated from my master's program back in May. I was in limbo for a couple of months before I got this job in Nashville. With the economy the way it was, I felt pretty lucky to be working in my field at all. I have an M.B.A., and I was working at a firm that buys failing companies and then sells them for a profit. They kept me pretty busy and I didn't have a lot of time for meeting friends outside of work. I tried to take a yoga class when I first got there, but I had to drop it when they started requiring overtime in my department. Online dating? Forget that sh*t.

My job was a little weird too, and that's why I hadn't made any friends at work. I swear it was some sort of hazing ritual for new employees. See, I was hired to deal with the acquisition of a new company, because apparently it was so big that my firm required additional employees to handle the buyout. The firm is called Gate Corporation. Sound familiar? Yeah, that's because they were involved in the Scylla scandal several years back. Apparently after the news broke, Gate lost all of its financial backing. It limped along for a few years but finally collapsed the quarter before.

So, my job was to go through Gate's financial records and look for inconsistencies. The problem was that, no f*cking lie, about half the pages of files I was supposed to go through were redacted! It was like the f*cking Cold War all over again! And when I tried to talk to my bosses about it, they wouldn't tell me anything except to work around the redacted bits! How the h*ll am I supposed to do my job and find financial inconsistencies if half the sh*t on the page is redacted? I even tried bringing it up once at one of our big meetings. I remember everyone in the quad was there. After I finished talking, they looked at me like I had hair growing out of my eyeballs. Finally, somebody just said that the redactions were "part of the job," and that was that. Seriously, if there had been a hazing policy on the books at that company, I would have complained.

Anyways, there I was, drinking alone at this bar in downtown Nashville on the Day after Christmas. The bartender looked like he felt a little sorry for me, but then again there were a dozen-odd other singles in the bar doing the exact same thing. He's probably numb to that sh*t by now. Some parade was on TV, so I watched it with the other sorry b*stards in the bar while I drank. One guy was completely sh*tfaced and flipped out every time a commercial with a sale greater than about 30% aired. After the parade was over, the bartender changed the channel to It's a Wonderful Life.

Several hours later, I decided that one more shot would be too many and I paid my tab. I wasn't tipsy, but I felt relaxed. (Note that I was not tipsy! This will be important later.) It was around 10:00 at night. I went out to my car and got in. I had it tuned to some rock station and Nickelback was on, but for once in my life I listened to their dumb a** music as I drove home.

I parked in the parking garage, said hi to the doorman and got in the elevator. My apartment was on the 27th floor of this massive building in midtown. Pretty sweet for a college grad, but I did have a master's degree, after all. It wasn't big—just a living room and kitchenette, a bedroom and a bathroom—but I liked it fine. Much better than a college dorm. When I got to my floor, I checked the mailbox. To my surprise, there was actually something there: a package. It was that gift from my aunt! Late but dependable, that's how she's always been.

I walked to my door, package in one hand, shoebox in the other, and keyed in to my apartment. There was no one in the hallway, undoubtedly because everyone else was having more fulfilling Days after Christmas than I was. I slid through the door and shut it behind me, then turned around to survey my domain.

And that's when I saw him.

So, this guy was sitting in my armchair by the window with one of my kitchen knives in his hand. He looked older than me, but it was hard to tell by how much. He had neatly trimmed facial hair and a smart-a**, smirking mouth. I noticed right away that the hand not holding the knife was a prosthetic. His eyes were creepy, dark and piercing and looking me up and down like a cut of meat at the butcher's. But it was his clothes that really made my eyes pop. He was wearing some of my clothes. That's right, my clothes!—a designer tracksuit I had bought at a consignment shop a while back that was two sizes too big.

He stood up slowly, the velour tracksuit shifting as he moved. I had no idea what the f**k was going on or how to react in this sort of situation. I had dropped the shoebox, and the package lay abandoned on the table by the door.

"How the f**k did you get in here?" I asked.

"Honey…" the man said slowly, enunciating each syllable. I broke out in chills in spite of myself. "…You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

I had some pepper spray in my purse, a remnant of a self-defense class I'd taken my fifth year of college, but there was no subtle way to get it out without the man's noticing. I stuck my hand in my purse anyways, and, no surprise, he took a step towards me. I flinched like a dog about to get whipped.

"I suppose you're about to try to make some grand stand and defend yourself," he said, "but that wouldn't be in your best interest, I'm afraid. So why don't you just sit yourself down in this here chair and we'll have ourselves a little talk?"

I held up my hands to show I didn't have the pepper spray. Internally, I was freaking the f**k out. No way this b*tch was going to boss me around in my own house. Then again, my Day after Christmas plans also didn't include getting shanked with my own kitchen knives. I sat down in one of my armchairs, never taking my eyes of the guy. He sat down in the chair by the window where he'd been before, the knife resting casually in his hand. Before speaking again, he watched me for a minute more. I had the distinct feeling that he was undressing me with his eyeballs, and I really didn't want to think about that.

"So what's your name, good-looking?" the man finally said.

"You first, b*tch," I answered. "This is my house."

"My, oh my!" he said, laughing to himself. As he spoke, he ran the tip of the knife over his prosthetic hand. "You do have a mouth on you. What would your mama say?"

"My mom's dead," I said. "Now who the f**k are you? Knife or no knife, I'll call the cops on your a** if you don't start talking."

Okay, so I was bluffing a little. At this point, I have no doubt that we were both mentally judging whether I could dial 911 successfully before he sunk a blade in my throat. For a hard minute we stared each other down. In the end, though, the man decided to take the path of least resistance.

"Well, a great man once said that necessity is the father of cooperation," he said slowly, turning the knife over in his hands. "I'll tell you what happened, but I would bet that pretty little bottom of yours that you won't buy what I'm selling."

"Just spit it out, f*cker," I said.

"If that's what you want," the man replied, eyeing me closely as he spoke.

"The name is Theodore Bagwell, and believe it or not, I'm about as clueless about this particular situation as you are. I was finishing up some—" his tongue darted out over his lips, "—business in my cell about an hour ago. Lights-out is at 10:00, but I like to be able to see what I'm doing, if you know what I mean to say. Anyways, before I had the opportunity to complete my transaction, I found myself in the middle of this here apartment, naked as the day my mama bore me. Se— "

"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "You expect me to believe that you teleported into my apartment…naked?"

"Well, that's what I did," the man, Theodore, said.

"And that's why you're wearing my clothes," I said.

"Yes."

"And you live in a prison?"

"That is correct," Theodore replied.

"Son of a b*tch."

I was having a mental overload right now. Was this guy talking about gay prison sex sh*t when he used the phrase "business transactions?" Did I really want to know? I had seen enough episodes of Law and Order to know "what really happened in jail." And all that aside, how did he actually end up in my apartment, anyways? This teleportation story had to be a load of bullsh*t. What the h*ll was going on here?

"Wait a second," I thought to myself. Flashback to the bar earlier that evening. I know that this was really bad of me, but around 8:00 I had had to go to the bathroom really badly. I had left my drink at the counter on my trip to the ladies' room, trusting the bartender to watch over it for me. I was only gone for five minutes max, but that must have been all it took. "Someone must have roofied my drink!" I thought to myself. Yeah, that was it! I was on roofies!

Theodore pointed the knife at me and shut one eye.

"Don't interrupt me when I'm talking to you," he said.

"Just finish your little story," I answered. Suddenly I wasn't nearly as worried about this Theodore guy anymore. I had gotten away from whoever wanted to f*ck with me and navigated the Nashville traffic despite being on Rohypnol. Now I was hallucinating, but at least I was in my own apartment. When I woke up in the morning, I'd feel hung over as h*ll, but this guy would be gone and I wouldn't have to worry about a d*mn thing.

"As I was saying," Theodore said pointedly, "I took the liberty of having a look around. It was a little drafty—" he laughed, "—so I tried on a few of your clothes. These were the only ones that fit, though. You're just such a little thing." As he said this, he licked his lips again. For a hallucination, this f*cker sure had a high sex drive.

"Once I was properly attired, I fully intended to capitalize on my newfound freedom. Unfortunately for both of us, though, this predicament of ours seems to be supernatural in more ways than one. You see, honey, I can't get out of this apartment." He gestured around the room as he spoke. "I tried the windows, and I tried the door. It opens just fine for you, I see, but it looks like I am high and dry in here."

"Kind of makes sense that you can't leave the apartment, since you're not real," I said.

"Not real? Is that so?" Theodore said, chuckling. He stood up and took a step closer to me, his eyes fixed to my face. The kitchen knife glinted at his side in the light from outside my window. "And what, if I may ask, has given you that impression?"

"I think I'm hallucinating. I bet somebody slipped me some roofies at the bar earlier," I told him. I wasn't worried, even though he was inching closer and closer to me, gradually invading my personal space. "I mean, listen to yourself, b*tch: why the f*ck would a teleporting convict show up naked in my apartment on the Day after Christmas? What do you think this is, the m*therf*cking crazy train?"

There was a moment of calm as my words sunk in.

Theodore moved in a flash, stepping past me to a table on the far side of the living room. Up until a few seconds earlier, the table had held a blue ceramic lamp that was a housewarming gift from my dad and Shawna when I moved into the apartment, but Theodore flung the lamp across the room in a single motion. The lamp hit the bookcase on the opposite and shattered to pieces. Shards of blue porcelain filled the air and scattered across the hardwood flooring. A few books fell off the shelf and landed open on the floor, their pages fluttering as the heater circulated air through the apartment.

I stood in shock at the sudden destruction wrought in my apartment settled in. For once in my life I was hard-pressed to come up with a rapid fire response for the situation. The roofies theory was out the window for sure. This b*tch was real.

"Still think I'm a hallucination?" Theodore asked calmly, cracking his knuckles against the table where the lamp had sat just a minute before. He licked his lips again as he sat back down in the chair facing mine.

"Apparently not," I said, my voice quivering ever so slightly.

"I'm glad we understand each other, then," he replied.

"Now, the only point of egress that I haven't tried yet is the ventilation system. I don't suppose you have a screwdriver?"

I did, actually; I had a whole toolbox in the linen closet. But I wasn't telling him that. So I said, "No, of course I don't. What did you expect, f*cking MacGyver?"

"Trust me, honey, once I had a look at your photo albums, I expected much better," Theodore said, smiling that creepy-a** smile with which I was rapidly growing familiar. "So here's what let's do. First thing tomorrow morning, you're going to run your pretty little self down to the hardware store and buy me a screwdriver. Then I'm going to break out of here, and you won't ever have to worry about seeing my face again. Sound like a deal?"

"Apparently," I said. I was doing everything I could to stay in control of the situation. "He may have the knife," I thought, "but this is still my house."

"Oh, I'm just pleased as punch to hear you say so," Theodore said, getting up from the armchair and stretching like a cat. I snuck a glance at the clock as he did: it was around 11:15. When I looked back over at Theodore, though, I saw that he was unzipping tracksuit jacket.

"The f*ck do you think you're doing?" I said.

"Well, now, honey…" Theodore said, pronouncing each syllable as if it deserved special importance. "You don't think I'm going to spend my first night out of prison alone, do you? Not when I'm holed up in this apartment with a fine specimen such as yourself."

As he spoke, he removed the jacket and laid it on the armchair. Of course, there was nothing underneath. Like all the convicts you hear about on TV, he was pretty ripped, but I was too f*cking terrified to notice. He started to unzip the pants and I freaked the f*ck out.

"Oh, h*ll no! If you think you're going to do that sh*t with me, you're just going to have to kill me first! I don't know what kind of a** you get in prison or how you convince those poor little sh*ts to sleep with you in the first place, but I'll have you know that I'm a virgin and no matter what you say or do, I'm saving myself for marriage, so you can just back the f**k off!"

"My, my, we've got a live one!" Theodore said, his tongue dancing wildly. He had stopped fiddling with his pants zipper, and now he seemed h*ll-bent on conversation. "Now, darling, do you really expect me to believe that in this great day and age we live in, a beautiful young thing like you would really last so long in that scary world out there without getting—" he chuckled, "—deflowered?"

"You don't know me, b*tch!" I retorted. I had always imagined making these sorts of statements to someone before, having the "you'll have to kill me first argument." Usually these thoughts surfaced after I'd watched too much Law and Order. Still, on some level I had never thought I'd actually have to say the words out loud. "I can't stop you from looking, but if you dare try and take my clothes off I will stab myself with that knife. Then who's going to buy your f*cking screwdriver, huh?"

Theodore watched me closely. After a long pause, he said, "I suppose that we've reached an impasse, haven't we?

"I do have one question. If you're a good little Christian girl who's saving yourself for marriage, then who put that mouth on you? Seems like a bit of a dichotomy, doesn't it, honey?"

I took a minute to think of the best way to answer. This could have been the difference between me getting raped and not getting raped.

"My mom's the one who always took me to church," I finally answered. "Like I told you earlier, she died a long time ago. I know I make a lot of mistakes, but I try to be a good Christian because that's what she taught me. It's my dad who used all this language when I was little. He's kind of a jack-a….what I mean is, he hasn't always been the best father to me. So I guess you could say that my Christianity is the virtue of my mother, but my cursing is…" I struggled to find the right words.

"The sins of your father," Theodore said. For once out of the entire evening, he looked like he didn't have sex on the brain.

"Yes," I said. "It's the sins of my father."

After that, the rest of the night proceeded much better (although of course that's relative, seeing as how I was being held hostage in my own apartment.) The words that I'd said seemed to have made a big impact on Theodore, though I couldn't be exactly sure why. I still didn't believe him that he couldn't get in and out of the apartment, and I wanted him out, so he showed me that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't budge the locks on the windows or the door. For me, they opened and closed just fine, but when Theodore tried to walk through them it was like some sort of impenetrable wall was there which he couldn't pass. Some freaky supernatural sh*t was definitely going on. Theodore was adamant about the screwdriver, so in the morning I said I would bring him one from the hardware store to help him break into the ventilation system. Given the way that he couldn't get out of the apartment any other way, though, I had my doubts.

I still felt pretty f*cking tense, what with the knife and the attempted rape and that sh*t, but midnight passed without a hitch and the moon slowly set in the sky. Around 3:00 a.m., Theodore asked me to tell him about my family. So I did, a little. I sure as h*ll wasn't sleeping, because although I was pretty sure I'd gotten through to him about the whole virginity thing earlier, I wasn't planning on testing his resolve. I told him about growing up with my mom and my dad in our pretty little house downtown. I talked about my first day of school and my first friend and my first crush in kindergarten. It was as much to keep myself awake as anything else. Somewhere in there Theodore started calling me "Snow White" instead of all those other pet names, which I guess was a reference to the virginity issue. He also asked me for my real name, and I gave it to him: Gwen Wilson. Keeping in his good graces seemed like a good way of saving my own skin.

But then, when the clock struck 5:00 a.m., a freaky situation got even freakier. Theodore was looking through the phone book at what times the local hardware stores open, when suddenly he just vanished. I had my eyes right on him. One minute he was there, the next minute, kaput. My tracksuit lay in a pile on the floor. I stared at the spot where he had been standing for a few minutes, then went in the bathroom and washed my face with water from the sink. I stared at myself in the mirror: long brown hair, red-rimmed dark eyes (from all that drinking on Day after Christmas), still wearing yesterday's clothes.

A convict had just teleported naked in and out of my apartment.

What the actual f*ck was going on here?!


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two: 12/27

I sure as h*ll wasn't going to sleep after a night like that, so I turned on CNN and watched depressing news stories about bombings in the Middle East and starving children in India. Sometimes the sh*t on the news gets so repetitive that it seems surreal, but that moment, those doe-eyed little kids on my television felt a lot more real than whatever the f*ck had just happened to me. Their malnourished faces, eyes popping out of their skulls as they tried to live another day, seemed to peer out of the TV screen and straight into my heart.

I called my doctor's office at 8:00 a.m., as soon as their business hours started. When I realized I was going to have to leave a message on the answering service because it was the holidays, though, I hung up. What the f*ck was I supposed to say? I could imagine it now: "I hallucinated a naked convict in my apartment last night, can you diagnose that over the telephone, please?" That's a no.

Something had to be medically wrong with me, I believed that. I had to believe that now that the sun had come up and the man was gone. Some kind of drug interaction or food poisoning must have happened, I told myself as I ate cereal at my kitchen counter. But no matter how hard I tried, there were some things I couldn't explain away. Like the shattered blue lamp in my living room floor. And the knife out of place by the cereal box, and the tracksuit crumpled on the tile near where I stood. How was I supposed to reconcile that sh*t with the normal life I'd led up until the day before? Was I just supposed to clean up the shards of the lamp and wash the tracksuit and pretend that nothing had ever happened? I looked at the room around me for as long as I could stand it, trying as hard as I could to make sense of it all. When I couldn't bear it anymore, I went back to my bedroom and shut the door.

The day went by in a blur, mostly because I was both hung-over and sleep-deprived. I tried to take a nap around noon, but I was too freaked out to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes all I could see was Theodore's creepy-a** eyes staring at me like I was meat at a slaughterhouse, or I remembered his hands starting to unzip my tracksuit bottoms. Before I knew it, I was in the bathroom puking my guts out, the nerves and the alcohol finally taking their toll. After that, I drank some apple juice so that I wouldn't get dehydrated. I felt like I'd been hit by a bus, so I spent the afternoon on the couch under some blankets watching daytime talk shows, the stupid ones where everyone's arguing about "who's the father" and throwing chairs and sh*t.

I ordered Chinese takeout in the evening from my favorite restaurant two streets over, with leftovers so I wouldn't have to cook the next day either. Back then, I didn't mind eating the same food two or three days in a row if it meant I didn't have to waste time cooking after I got home from auditing those f*cking redacted documents from Gate Corporation. (Seriously, what the f*ck was that sh*t? It still really pisses me off.) When I went in the bathroom to fix up before the deliveryman arrived, I flinched when I saw myself in the mirror. No surprise, but I looked like absolute h*ll.

As I reached into my purse to tip the deliveryman, I saw something from yesterday that I had totally forgotten about: my aunt's Christmas gift. Once the guy was gone, I brought the box over to the counter with me along with the bag of Chinese food so I wouldn't forget about it again. After I had finished my cashew chicken and egg rolls and stuck the leftovers in the refrigerator, I took my aunt's gift to the bookcase and set it on a shelf. I had to walk carefully, sidestepping the shards of blue porcelain on the floor that I still hadn't cleaned up. I would have to do that later, but that also meant acknowledging that the events of the night before had really happened, that they weren't just a case of food poisoning or roofies or some sh*t. I wasn't ready for that yet, so I just made sure not to cut my bare feet.

Growing up, Mom always enforced the rule that if a gift in the mail arrived after Christmas Day, I couldn't open it until New Year's. She f*cking loved the holidays, and this was just another way that she had come up with for dragging them out. When December 1 rolled around, she got this special gleam in her eye, and every night at dinner she would say, "Hmm, I wonder what we got you for Christmas this year?" She had all sorts of tactics like that: like, we opened our presents three times throughout the day on Christmas instead of tearing through them all at once at three in the morning. After she died, Dad and Shawna didn't give a f*ck about that kind of thing, but I carried on the traditions with or without them. Whenever I got the sweet satisfaction of opening that one last Christmas present on New Year's Day, it reminded me of those early years when Mom and Dad and I were happy together. So, on the bookshelf it went. I wouldn't touch it until New Year's Day, I silently promised myself.

I tried to read a little after that, some old National Geographic magazines and the Haruki Murakami novel I had been chiseling away at since I moved to Nashville. I felt myself scanning the same lines of text over and over again. Eventually I gave up and turned on CNN for a while. Once I'd had my fill of the celebrity gossip and political intrigue that usually fills the nightly news schedule, I finally decided that it was around time for a shower. Showers were usually a surefire way for me to relax and unwind after a stressful day. After I took a shower, I usually sat in bed with a novel and read for an hour or two, or else watched TV if a show I really liked was on. Anyways, showers were like my gateway drug to a good night's sleep. And I was sleeping like a f*cking rock tonight, I told myself as I walked into the bathroom.

I undressed while I waited for the water temperature to heat up. Once the bathroom mirror had started to steam up, I stepped in the shower stall. The hot water coursed over my hair and my shoulders, and for the first time all day I felt some of the stress of the day before starting to melt away. The tension in my shoulders began to slacken, and I sighed with fatigue. As I shaved my legs and washed my hair, I took more care than usual, specifically focusing on the tasks at hand to drive out all outside thoughts of the f*cked-up sh*t that was currently screwing up my life. Streams of shampoo swirled into the water coursing down the shower drain. As I rinsed out my shampoo and got ready to use my conditioner, I realized that I had probably been in the shower for a super-long time. I didn't want to stay up too late, given that I was hung over and all. I rinsed the soap out of my eyes and rubbed the steam off the shower door so I could take a look at the clock by the bathroom mirror.

And I screamed.

I screamed like a banshee, because he was there. He was f*cking there. Theodore was standing right outside my shower door, a**-naked, just like he said he happened the day before. I had locked the bathroom door from the inside out of habit, and there were no windows. A naked convict had seriously just teleported into my f*cking bathroom. He wasn't wearing a d*mn thing and his eyes were roving over me like a kid looking at his Christmas presents.

"Well, d*mn," he said. "If it isn't Snow White! My, my, ain't you looking fine?"

I panicked. I covered myself as best I could with my hands and tried to think of something to say. What I came up with probably didn't make a lot of sense, but I was f*cking terrified.

"I have a knife!"

Theodore chuckled, his gaze starting at the tips of my toes and running up everything in between to meet my eyes. He licked his lips.

"I bet you always shower with a knife, don't you, honey? You got a chainsaw in there too?"

He wasn't buying it. No surprise there. I went for Plan B, the standby "you'll have to kill me first" argument. That had seemed to work the night before.

"If you try to open that shower door I will kill myself, motherf*cker. I will fight you to the f*cking death and then you'll be trapped in this apartment night after night with a f*cking corpse!"

"Is that so?" Theodore said. He hadn't taken his eyes off of my body yet, and it was painfully obvious that he was enjoying himself. After a moment's thought, he said, "Well, maybe it'd be better if you got yourself decent and we continued this conversation elsewhere. Otherwise, I might be tempted to do something we'd both regret."

I couldn't agree with him more, so I turned off the water right away. This created its own set of problems, because if I wanted to get out of the shower I needed to towel off, and the towel was outside the shower stall (obviously). Theodore saw me glancing over at the towel rack and took down a towel. The mere thought of him touching something I was supposed to dry myself off with made my stomach turn with disgust.

"Allow me," he said, his tongue dancing lasciviously.

"Think again, b*tch," I shot back. "Hand it over the top of the door, and go put some f*cking clothes on."

Theodore handed the towel over the door to the shower stall, and I gratefully wrapped it around myself. After one last creepy-as-sh*t look at my barely shielded figure, he unlocked the door and stepped into the hall. Once he had left the bathroom, I darted out of the shower and shut and locked the door as quickly as possible. As I put on my pajamas, I tried to process what was going on.

What the actual f*ck was this? He came back?! He wasn't supposed to come back! This was supposed to be a one-time thing, a drug trip, a hallucination, food poisoning, anything! If it happened more than once, that made it real! The lamp breaking, the tracksuit on the kitchen floor, that was one thing, but multiple occurrences? Where the h*ll were we supposed to go from f*cking multiple occurrences?! My mind danced in circles around this latest terrifying turn of events, but no matter how I spun it I couldn't find the solution. I only opened the bathroom door when I was ready to face what lay outside. There were no excuses this time. This was my life now.

I found Theodore in my living room, sitting in the chair that I had used the night before. He didn't have a knife this time, which I thought was probably a good sign, although with him it was getting a little hard to tell. When he saw me, he stood up, another one of those creepy-a** smiles on his face.

"Snowy! How nice of you to join me!" he said. "I must confess that I didn't have seeing you again in my evening plans tonight."

"Neither did I, you son of a b*tch," I answered.

"Gwyneth, has anyone ever told you that you curse far too often?" Theodore asked. "A lovely girl like you just doesn't jive with a lexicon like that."

"Jesus Christ," I thought. Out loud, I said, "My word choice is none of your business, you f*ck. Now, what was it that you wanted to talk about?"

"Well, I am just pleased as punch that you asked." As Theodore spoke, he stood up and began to look around the room. "As of this moment, my number one priority is getting out of this apartment. Not that I don't delight in your company, my dear, but freedom is infinitely comparable to living in a cage…no matter who one shares it with." His tongue darted out as he spoke these last words.

"Right," I said. "Well, let's just say that between yesterday and today I might have acquired a screwdriver. Would that get you the f*ck out of my life?"

"Oh, Snowy, you shouldn't have," Theodore said, spreading his arms out wide. "That might do just the trick. Be a doll and bring it to me, won't you?"

I did as he asked, quickly retrieving the toolbox from my linen closet and searching through it for the screwdriver. I kept one eye on Theodore as I did so, but he was absorbed in his own business, moving the armchair and chest of drawers out of the way in one corner of my apartment to give him a closer look at my air conditioning vent. I guess he was hoping that the vent was tied into the apartment building's central ventilation system and that that would be his ticket to freedom. Given that he couldn't just walk out the door or even climb out the window like a normal human being, though, I didn't have high hopes about the endeavor. Once Theodore had seen me bring the toolbox out from the linen closet, he must have known that I had been lying the day before about being in possession of a screwdriver. I was relieved when he didn't say anything. As far as I was concerned, the less that b*tch talked to me, the better.

"Here it is," I finally said, holding up a red-handled screwdriver from the set. The kit had been a gift from my dad and Shawna on my birthday a couple of years ago, but I'd never had a need to use it. I've never been a very handy person. I bet they never imagined that the first time I would use their precious toolbox would be to try to help a teleporting naked convict bust out of my apartment to freedom. (Seriously, what the f*ck?)

"You have my gratitude," Theodore said as he took the screwdriver from my outstretched hand. I felt a shock go through me as our fingers brushed, as if I'd been shocked with a cattle prod. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as Theodore turned away and set to work on the vent.

Theodore carefully removed each screw holding the vent in place. The process took longer than it usually would because he was proceeding with caution, careful not to strip any of the screws in their sockets. As Theodore worked, I stole a glance at the clock on the microwave in my kitchenette. It was 10:27—that meant that Theodore had appeared in my apartment around 10:00 again, right at his prison's lights-out time. There was a f*cking pattern starting to emerge here. A loud groan of metal snapped my attention back to the task at hand. Theodore had removed the grate and dust was swirling around his bowed head as he knelt on my floor. He peered into the darkness beyond the gaping hole in my wall.

"Well, then, Snowy…I suppose this is goodbye," Theodore said. He began to crawl forward.

Theodore's head slammed into an invisible wall, just as it had when he tried to exit my apartment through the door and windows. He stood up, punched the apartment wall, and cursed in frustration.

"F*ck," I thought. "What the h*ll are we supposed to do now?"

The first thing I did was make him put the grate back in place. Once there wasn't a giant f*cking hole in the wall anymore, I decided to go from there. True, there was dust all over the floor from Theodore's aborted expedition into the ventilation system, but, like the shards of lamp from yesterday, I just wasn't ready to clean that sh*t up right now.

"Are you hungry?" I asked, a bit begrudgingly. I sure as h*ll wasn't cooking for the guy, but I needed to make some sort of peace offering to make up for what happened yesterday. Apparently this was going to be a thing now.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said, are you hungry?" I repeated.

"Snow White, do you know the average quality of prison food in the state of Illinois?" Theodore asked. I hate people that answer a question with another question. "In my personal experience, I have found that it rates slightly above what they give to chickens. In answer to your question, then, yes, I am ravenous. What have you got?"

"There's Chinese food in the fridge. You can get it yourself if you want it. Plates are to the left of the microwave."

"Chinese food..." Theodore considered my offer. "Well, I sure could go for some Southern comfort cooking right about now, but I guess anything is better than that prison slop."

I sat on the couch and watched warily while Theodore fixed his food. Honestly, it was kind of funny, because he looked like he had no idea how the microwave worked. "Has he really been behind bars that long?" I wondered, but I wasn't going to get up and help him. If he couldn't make it work, he could eat that sh*t cold as far as I was concerned. Finally, Theodore heated up the cashew chicken and egg rolls—what was supposed to be my lunch tomorrow. He brought the steaming plate out to the couch and set it on the coffee table near where I was seated. After an experimental bite, he dug in with relish.

"This is the best food I've had in years, Snowy," Theodore said, "and that's saying a lot, considering that it ain't American."

"You know, the Chinese did invent writing, gunpowder and organized states," I replied.

"Honey, let's not talk about the races tonight. Spouting off some facts you learned in your government-approved history class isn't going to prove a d*mned thing. Why don't you tell me more about that lovely little childhood of yours?"

So, in the interest of keeping Theodore calm and unarmed, I did. I told him about the house where I grew up and the friends I knew in the neighborhood and all the games we played together. I told him about my room, and my first stuffed animals and the special names I gave them. I told him about my first dog and how much she meant to me. I told him about my parents—about Mom, and how great she was, and about Dad, and about his love mixed with his mistakes. I told him about when Mom got sick and how scared I was, and how she faded so fast that she was here one day and gone the next. I told him how Dad acted after Mom was gone and how he married Shawna and the way things were after that. And Theodore listened to every word I said. He listened so intently that it was like he was memorizing each word and writing it down and locking it in a box deep inside his heart.

I talked until my brain started to slow down and my eyes began to cross. I realized that I hadn't slept in nearly thirty-six hours, and that coupled with a hangover meant that I was f*cking exhausted. I slowly trailed off in the middle of the story I was telling, about how Shawna grounded me from going to my senior prom because of some sh*t lie she told my dad about me disrespecting her as a stepparent. (I snuck out and went anyways, but then I was grounded for the whole summer.) Theodore eyed me closely as I drifted towards the clutches of sleep.

"I am so f*cking tired," I finally said.

"Well, we were both a little occupied last night, weren't we, Snowy?" Theodore replied.

I started to stand up and walk towards my bedroom, but my legs felt like Jell-o. I collapsed back onto the couch. I was experiencing the epitome of exhaustion—a hangover paired with sleep deprivation paired with psychological trauma.

"I'm going to sleep here on this couch," I managed to articulate. "If you touch me…"

"If I touch you, you'll off yourself, yes, yes, so I've heard," he said. "Don't worry, darling, I'll be your Prince Charming tonight, so you just sleep tight."

I wasn't sure whether I believed him or not, but I was basically insensible at that point, so I just lay down. I was so tired that I probably passed out within ten seconds of my head hitting the cushions.

I woke up the next morning around 10:00 a.m. Theodore was gone, just like he had been the night before. The first thing I did was give myself a once-over, but my clothes were intact and my hair wasn't even tousled. I was definitely in the exact same position that I had been in when I went horizontal the night before. He hadn't touched me, just like he'd promised. But the tracksuit was crumpled in a heap in the armchair across from the sofa. From what it looked like, he had just sat there and watched me sleep for the rest of the night like a f*cking creeper.

Prince Charming my a**.


End file.
